The Sleep of Death

     Maaya rolled over on the mattress, reaching out to silence the bells that insisted she wake and begin the day. She stretched, careful not to release the warmth from beneath the quilt and blanket under which she slept. As with every other night in the dead of winter, cold had seeped into the room during the hours of darkness, and she was reluctant to leave her bed. She did rise, however, shuddering as the air nipped her skin. Throwing on a robe that bore the chill of the atmosphere, knowing that it would warm eventually, she made her way from the room in darkness and headed downstairs where she could look forward to the cozy heat of the kitchen. Ren always woke first- how he managed, Maaya had no idea- and each day sat waiting for her at the table while the water boiled on the stove.

     She paused at the bottom of the stairs. The sitting room was cold and dark as every other morning, yet an odd tingle telegraphed that something was amiss. No light spilled from the entryway to the kitchen. The chill from the stone floor made its way through her worn slippers as Maaya crept toward the room. She peered in to find it dark and empty. Shrugging off her disquiet, Maaya flicked the light switch, relieved to find the electricity running. It could be tricky in winter, when storms downed the power lines or there was a shortage of labor. Taking a handful of firewood from the bin beside the door, she lit a blaze in the stove and put the kettle on, thankful for the running water in her home. For those that lived outside of cities like Mianuus, water was drawn from wells, rivers or hand pumps. Even some within the city limits had no access to tap water, but usually they swapped commodities with neighbors for the privilege of using theirs.

     While waiting for the water to boil, Maaya rummaged through the cabinets, sorting through the stock of food available, trying to decide what to make for breakfast. Food had to be carefully rationed in winter, especially for people like Maaya and Ren who had no direct access to its sources. Seeing that there was plenty of oatmeal, she decided on that. Still hearing no sounds of stirring upstairs, she assumed her brother must have caught a cold. Possessed of a generous nature, Maaya doted on her younger sibling, and this morning was to be no exception. Reaching around to the back of the cabinet, she pulled out the small canister of coffee- a luxury imported from the distant and unknown lands overseas- and decided to indulge Ren. She also decided not to flavor the oatmeal with molasses or the coarse brown sugar that was usual, but with some of the syrup that came from the northern reaches of the country, a small bottle of which she’d been given during the summer.

     As she prepared the meal, she listened carefully for signs that her brother was awake. None fell on her ears.

     I hope he wasn’t up all night with those books of his, she thought, a small line of worry creasing her forehead.

     Though incredibly close to one another emotionally, Ren and Maaya were “about as similar as the stars and the mountains” as the saying went. Maaya, some five years Ren’s senior, was in all things careful and practical. She never slept until she was positive all the tasks of the day were complete, nor would she relax until a pressing matter was resolved. It was she who was the organizational backbone of the house, rationing food, deciding which items could be parted with for payment to others and choosing which articles of clothing could be mended and which would have to be replaced. Thanks to her staggering capacity for attention to detail, the pair lived a rather comfortable life, rarely in want of anything.

     Maaya was of medium height and a very sturdy build, which gave her the strength to lug firewood and bags of grain around the city with relative ease. A seamstress by trade, her able hands were calloused by the pricks of needles and a plethora of housework. There were whispers of marvel from the neighbors that at twenty-eight she was still unmarried. Though far from stunning to look at, she had all the trademarks of an excellent wife and a figure that proclaimed she’d bear any children with ease. She was known as a charming woman with excellent manners who laughed at all the proper moments and had a way of setting everyone around her at ease. However, those that saw the face Maaya wore for the public knew nothing of her intensely reserved soul. Though she had a great capacity for affection, which she lavished on her brother, she also possessed a strong distrust for strangers. Aside from Ren, no one was close to her- in fact, he was the only person permitted to touch her. This came not from a vocal prohibition, but from her instinctual manner of positioning herself in a way that it became either impossible or extremely awkward for anyone to attempt to do so.

     Ren, on the other hand, was a person ruled by a world of dreams. Engulfed as he was by his passions, he took little notice of the true and waking world. He didn’t even seem to realize if he was hungry or full, eating whenever food was in front of him and never complaining if it wasn’t. He rarely became upset, and in all their lives Maaya had never heard him raise his voice in anger, not even in his earliest years of childhood. Many people found him rather strange. Those that knew Maaya were kind to him at first out of respect for her, until won over by his gentle and affectionate nature. He had no trace of his sister’s mistrust for others, and treated all the people he came in contact with in the same open, engaging manner. Ren was the involuntary mentor of a handful of neighborhood children, who flocked to him, drawn by the respect he showed them when speaking to them about whatever subject took their fancy.

     Early in his life, Ren had become intensely curious about the history of the nation of Diasminion, about which little was known. He wondered at the truths behind the stories passed on orally through generations- the Tale of the Saviors, about a handful of Diasminian heroes who rescued the world from certain doom, and the story of the Enlightened One, who overthrew the system of tyranny to bring freedom to the land. Drawn by the mysterious idea of the Clans, he tried to learn their names, coming up with only a few. It wasn’t until he moved with Maaya to the city of Mianuus and met Jorin that he began to venture into the realms of the answers to his questions.

     For Ren, the year that he parted from his parents was the bleakest he had ever lived. He was only twelve when he went from the northeastern countryside to the city that had once been the capitol with his sister. After his father was crippled in an accident on their farm, it became increasingly hard for the family to provide for themselves. To Maaya, the solution seemed obvious- either she and Ren took over the farm entirely, or moved away, allowing her parents to give up the land and settle someplace more manageable. Their mother, who’d spent years grooming her teenaged daughter for marriage, wouldn’t accept the idea of Maaya breaking her back in the fields, for the bulk of the work would fall to her as Ren was young and had the disconcerting habit of drifting off in reverie right in the middle of a task. It was decided that the family would part, a hard fact for Ren to swallow, as he was unbearably attached to his parents and the home where he’d grown up naming flowers and insects and making pets of grass and rocks.

     He was fifteen when he met Jorin, a boy of the same age. Unlike Ren, who was completely useless to his sister (Maaya turned a blind eye on this fault), Jorin provided for himself and had already moved away from his teeming home. However, he shared the same passion for history, though his interest lay more in technology than social structure- he was a repairman by trade. The two boys soon ignited one another’s dormant curiosity. Within a few years, they’d amassed a store of texts copied from scavenged books along with artifacts from around the city and beyond, items viewed as useless rubbish by the majority of Diasminion’s citizens. Learning to make heads or tails of the books took long years of study. Both the written and spoken language of Diasminion had evolved in the seven hundred or more years since the books had been published. As the boys grew into young men they persevered, and now both were fairly capable in their translations. Neither one had lost their voracious appetites for information- if anything, it had increased.

     Now, at the age of twenty-three, Ren had found the answers to his childhood questions. He knew the names of all nine Clans, and had a basic understanding of their functions in ancient society. He’d read several accounts of the lives of the Saviors, known in their day as “Champions”. He’d learned with dismay of the bloody coup that became the Enlightenment, and with surprise that the Saviors and their children had been involved- as part of the opposition to the Enlightened One. He discovered the name of Qa Haran, a name so coated in the dust of time it had long since been forgotten. All his answers led only to further questions. Ren was particularly intrigued by the mysticism of the Night’s Herald, a Clan whose name and faith had disappeared, eroded by the waters of ages. However, he found any study of the religion practiced by the bygone Clan incredibly difficult. While most books published in the hundred years before the Enlightenment were written in the language commonly spoken at the time, works regarding the practices of the Night’s Herald were written in characters of a far more primitive origin. Only in recent months had he been able to glean any information from the few texts he’d managed to locate and copy. When pressed by his sister to explain his obsession, Ren found he could not express the primordial urges in his soul that made him feel the crumbling old books held the key to his spiritual home.

     Together the young men had built an impressive library- a small museum, in fact. Though at first the people of the city regarded their venture with skepticism and humor, the pair soon came to be respected as some of the only historians of their age. People began to donate books, ask to have trinkets identified, or inquire after ancient knowledge that might solve a modern-day problem. Jorin applied his knowledge of ancient technology to his thriving business as a mechanic, while Ren opened a small shop where he bartered antiquities as practical or luxury items. In the beginning, the shop did poorly, but Ren’s natural friendliness and vast store of anecdotes made him a born salesman. These days the shop saw a steady stream of business, with a small boom each year right before Wish Day.

     Ren was at the shop nearly every day of the week, closing only once every eight days. He rose early, often attempting to cram in some additional study before he opened. He’d altered his schedule only three times in the last four years, so his absence from the kitchen and the silence upstairs troubled Maaya, so greatly that she became irritated with the time it took to prepare breakfast, cursing her watched pots as they refused to boil. Frustrated, she trudged back upstairs, pretending not to be straining to hear the sounds of her brother waking, and went into the small bathroom to wash her face. She made as much noise as possible, splashing loudly and landing heavy footfalls on the tiles. Sure her work was done and that Ren would soon rouse and join her, she dried her face and peered into the mirror. She saw nothing unusual. Her slightly narrow, wide-set pale brown eyes stared back at her, flanking the nose that ended in a somewhat bulbous point. She saw the usual coarse skin, its freckles paled by the weak winter light. Baring her teeth, she saw the small gap in the front, usually hidden by her thin lips. Sighing, she ran a brush through her hair- her one beauty, she felt. It was thick and wavy, with strands of gold interspersed with brown. Careful of her sole treasure, she lavished such care on her locks that they were never anything other than silken and shining.

     Maaya returned to the first floor, where the water had finally come to a boil. Silently, she finished getting breakfast ready. Still, Ren had not appeared. After she’d set the food on the table, she headed back upstairs, this time calling,

     “Ren? Ren, get up! You’re going to be late.”

     She entered his room without trepidation, her eyes falling quickly on his sleeping form. She stood a moment, studying him in the light of dawn.

     Ren, Maaya often claimed without any hint of jealousy, was the beauty of the family. Like her, he was of medium height with an able-bodied frame, lean and muscular. However, he was blessed with smooth skin that changed hue with the passing seasons and large eyes that bore a look of innocence and wonder. Those eyes were brown, imbued with rays of green and adorned with thick lashes. Though he had a similar nose to Maaya’s, his looked far more at home on his face with those heavy eyebrows and full lips. In turns he either looked intensely curious or impossibly at peace, nothing in between. Sleep did not change him, save for the way the shoulder length strands of his sandy brown hair fell across his face.

     “Ren?” She called to him again.

     He didn’t stir.

     After some deliberation, Maaya decided to wake him. He could always go back to sleep if he was inclined. She had a nagging sensation that he’d want her to wake him if he’d ever overslept. Resolved, she walked over to the bed and gave him a gentle shake.

     “Ren, wake up.”

     Still, he didn’t move. She shook him harder.

     “Get up.”

     When she received no response, Maaya tried once more, this time shaking with all her might. Nothing happened.

     “Ren?”

     Feeling the panic that had begun to claw through her insides, she stepped backwards, closing her eyes until she felt still enough to focus.

     “Ren?” Her voice cracked over the plea, which went unheeded.

     Fighting for self-control, Maaya approached her brother once more, this time reaching out to lay her hand on his forehead. His skin felt cold, but she rationalized quickly that this was due to the cold air in the room, and decided to reach under the covers to validate her theory. To her horror, she found his entire body chill and stony. She listened in vain for the sounds of his heartbeat and searched for signs of his breath but found nothing. Her brother, that younger sibling for whom she cared more than anyone else on the face of the planet, lay cold and lifeless, far too heavy in her arms as she wept.

     Once she’d composed herself, Maaya hastily threw on some clothes and left the humble abode where she resided. She followed the streets automatically until she reached the home of the local doctor, who serviced the entire neighborhood. His wife told Maaya that he’d be there as soon as possible and she left to go home and wait, politely refusing offers of tea by the hearth, unable to bear the weight of public pretense. The doctor, an aged man who’s long since lost his true name and was known only by the moniker “Doc”, arrived a little over half an hour later. His wizened visage and bushy white hair brought a twinge of nostalgia to Maaya’s heart, who hadn’t seen him in well over a year. That feeling was quashed, however, at the sight of the man who accompanied him, one who Maaya had never before laid eyes on.

     The stranger was tall, but by no means lanky, filling out his carefully tailored clothing. He wore a neatly pressed pair of brown trousers, a dusky green sweater and an overcoat, all of which hung on his frame with the ease of much use, despite their neat appearance. His boots were polished to a gleam, though the softness of the leather told the tale of the number of seasons they’d been in use. His hair, a deep shade that brought to mind the seeds of a pomegranate, was slick and cleanly trimmed. He had a square jaw and the face of a young boxer before his first fight- still pristine, but with the slightly harried expression of one who knows he’s about to be walloped. His storm-cloud eyes fell on Maaya with an expression of gentle empathy.

     “Maaya!” The doctor exclaimed with warmth. “This is Benar, my new assistant. Well, he’s not exactly new- been with me nearly eight months- but you and Ren keep yourselves in such good health I’m almost never here. What seems to be the trouble today?”

     As the doctor waited patiently for Maaya to explain her reason for requesting him, she clutched the back of one of the kitchen chairs with such ferocity that she felt her nails sinking into the wood. She sought the composure to say what she needed without bursting into tears.

     Cry later. Cry later. Cry later. Cry later.

     It was the presence of Benar, a completely unknown entity, that allowed her to speak without emotion.

     “Ren’s dead.”

     “Dead? What happened to him?”

     “I- I don’t know. He didn’t get up this morning and when I went to wake him, he was… he was dead.”

     “Oh… Oh, dear. Well, I’ll go and have a look, shall I?” The doctor shuffled with discomfort. Despite his age and experience, he was rather fond of Ren and Maaya, and had never really learned to take an untimely death with a stiff upper lip. “Why don’t you go wait for us in the sitting room? Benar will set a fire for you in the hearth.” Turning to the younger man, he said, “You’ll join me upstairs when you’re finished.”

     Benar merely nodded. The doctor saw to it that Maaya was seated on the sofa before he went on his way upstairs. Soon after, the silent assistant entered from the kitchen and lit a fire as he was instructed. He spoke not a word to Maaya, who was grateful for this. The last thing she wanted to worry about was drumming up answers to some unknown man’s false sympathy. When he was finished, he left the room with no more than a single backward glance, leaving Maaya alone with her heavy heart. She wanted sorely to bury her face in the familiar pillows and sob, but a numbness had settled over her, born in part of her need to remain calm and composed.

     A short time later, the doctor returned, sans assistant, and meekly took a seat in an armchair facing her.

     “I’m very sorry, Maaya, but it appears you were correct. Your brother has… passed away.”

     She didn’t break down as he’d expected her to, forcing him to continue without the pause he’d been hoping for.

     “I’m going to have to ask you some questions.”

     “Alright.”

     “Was Ren sick at all? Did he seem to have a cold? Anything?”

     “No, he was fine.”

     The doctor sighed.

     “I hate to have to ask you this, but… Well, there are so many young people these days who-”

     “Are you going to ask me if Ren was playing around with stuff like Hinterlasst or Doku? Don’t bother. He wasn’t. Hell, we can’t even afford to drink. You knew that,” Maaya said defensively.

     “I know,” the doctor assured her. “But I had to ask. I’m afraid that your brother’s death is a mystery, even to me. If you want me to look into it further, I’ll have to perform an autopsy. I’m certain it was heart failure, but for what reason I don’t know.”

     “Don’t bother with an autopsy. I don’t want him cut to pieces on top of everything else.”

     The resignation in Maaya’s voice caused the doctor to cringe in his chair.

     “Well, then… About the disposal of the remains,” he began gently, “I can introduce you to some people that do burials or others that do cremations, depending on your preference.”

     “My people burn their dead.”

     “Alright, then. Say I come by tonight in the evening, after dinner-”

     “Sir?” Benar had crept halfway down the stairs. Maaya had noticed him, but nothing in her expression had acknowledged his presence, so the doctor jumped in surprise at the interruption. “May I have a word with you?”

     “When I’m finished, Benar.”

     “It’s rather urgent.”

     “Alright then.” Maaya could see by the puzzled, sidelong glance the doctor gave his assistant that this kind of interruption was not a common occurrence.

     The old man rose and plodded heavily up the stairs. For a time, there was only silence from above. Eventually, the voices started to rise, obviously engaged in debate. Try as she might, Maaya could make out nothing being said. She waited with subdued curiosity until the men reappeared, trooping down the stairs. As they sat, the doctor beside her on the sofa and Benar in the armchair, the old man said suddenly,

     “This is on your head, Benar.”

     Maaya turned her pale brown eyes on the assistant. He folded his hands before speaking.

     “Miss Maaya, I don’t believe your brother has passed away.”

     Her look of quiet inquisition turned to one of shock.

     “You- you don’t?”

     “No, I don’t. Mind you, I cannot be completely certain as I’ve never seen the like of this before, but…” He trailed off, deep grey eyes flickering with doubt and anxiety. He trained them on the doctor, who returned his gaze.

     “You go on and tell her what you told me,” the old man said. “See if she sees any merit in it. Maaya’s got a good head.”

     “Admittedly, your brother- Ren, was it?- seems to have died, and yet… Miss Maaya, I’ve seen a lot of death. You get a sense for it after a while. There’s this absence you feel… I can’t explain to you. I lack the eloquence. The point is, in that room upstairs, that feeling simply isn’t there. I don’t know how or why your brother could be both living and dead, but to me, that’s how it appears.”

     The old doctor shook his head sadly as Maaya attempted to reply, but found she could muster no words. Mutely, she turned her head toward Doc, who spoke softly to her.

     “I can’t tell you whether or not to trust Benar on this. He’s a very talented young man, and does seem to possess a sense I haven’t… but I do realize what he’s asking of you. I don’t condone it, but if he is correct and I’m mistaken, the cost would be grave indeed.”

     “If you would allow me,” Benar’s even voice continued as though the aside hadn’t occurred, “I would like to monitor your brother’s condition for a while. At the first sign of any decay of his body, I’ll see to it that he receives the funeral of your wishes, at my own expense. I feel very strongly that he’ll wake, though at the moment it’s impossible to prove.”

     As the old doctor resumed the shaking of his head, Maaya stared at Benar, her gaze calculating.

     “All right. I agree.”